When I started coding the SteamCalculator for the German Half-Life Community page HLPortal.de, I never thought it would get that big. The very first version took me about half a day and could only sum up listed games of an Steam user. Six weeks later, even game packages were considered. A couple month after that, steamcalculator.com was registered, and the SteamCalculator got it’s own website.

If you wonder, what the SteamCalculator might be, to keep it simple: The SteamCalculator is tool for gamer, which can be used to calculate the value of a Steam Account. It basically sums up all your games, which are registered via Steam, and tells you, how much it is worth. Some people call it a new tool for ePenis measurements.
If you do not know what a Steam Account is, you will have no use for the SteamCalculator anyway – sorry.
If you claim yourself to be “gamer”, you should have Steam installed on your PC already. If not…, dude, your missing something!

But let’s get back to the topic. As time passes, people keep sending me feedback with feature requests and even, unfortunately, bugs. Actually, there are quite a lot bug reports coming in these weeks.

• One of the most annoying ones, would be the “my acount is not private” bug. For some reason some accounts only work with profile IDs and not with their custom URLs. This causes the calculator to says it’s an “private” account, even though it’s not.
• Second problem would be all the “broken links”. It is hard keeping track with Valve’s “lets change some IDs”-plans. AppIDs (unique IDs for Steam games) are fine, as long as they are no demo or beta versions, which will be deactivated after a while. But worst of all, are packages. Their subIDs keep changing… damn, got to find a way to fix that.

These are just two bugs, which will be solved soon. A way bigger problem actually is, invalid input by the user. People keep typing their account names (normally a email) or have even an invalid XML profile. Yes, that’s right, it is possible to have invalid UTF-8 chars in your profile, which kills the calculator. I have a total of 22,447 users, which have “broken XML profiles” so far. Even browsers show a unknown character (no, that does not mean, I haven’t installed the font). Well yes, there are ways to work around that problem, but it’s like having keys for a car, which still needs to get hot wired, because it’s keys don’t fit.

In fact it is a user problem. Most of them are “leet kiddies” abusing UTF-8 to literally draw images into their profiles (some look good, though). Or they have friends or joined a group, which is using UTF-8 to create special symbols in their names.
And that is the thing. Some smart people invented “standards” like ISO 10646 to avoid such a mistakes. But who expects kids to know about international standards? Sometimes, it is their computer, which messes everything up. Just to give you a number, to highlight the problem. About 46.2% of all profiles contain an invalid UTF-8 character. Hat means, half of my users can’t even use the SteamCalculator. My biggest goal for second version of the SteamCalcultor, would be to decrease that number, because seriously, who would think it’s his fault, if the calculation fails? No one, right! At the end, they blame me, for doing such a poor job. Well, it’s time to change that.

So, if you have any suggestions for the new version, feel free to post them or, if you wish, send them via email to info [et] steamcalculator [dot] com.
And yes, I am looking for a new fresh design.